Speculative Fiction Junkie

Ben Bova

Ben Bova is one of those authors whose name I've known since I started reading science fiction but whose work I had never read. I knew he had written a lot of books but was surprised and impressed to learn that he has written over 100 of them! Mars Life is his latest effort and while it's part of his Grand Tour series it works just fine as a standalone novel.

I found the premise of Mars Life to be a very intriguing one: An expedition to Mars had previously discovered some sort of dwellings in the cliffs of a canyon on the Red Planet, which proved that some form of intelligent life had once lived there. But just when a Martian village is discovered, the increasingly powerful religious right threatens to halt progress on the excavation by cutting off its funding and censoring media broadcasts of materials relating to Mars.

That Dr. Bova intends to make the relationship between religion and science one of the central themes of the book is underscored by the book's opening quotation from one of the truly great documents on the subject: Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (you really should read it if you haven't already).

The main accomplishment of Mars Life is its more or less realistic portrayal of the dilemmas that an expedition to Mars would face. The members of the expedition, and their supporters on Earth, are obsessed with logistical and funding issues. Similarly, they are more or less tethered to their base by the limitations of the machinery they rely on to protect them from the cruel Martian atmosphere.

Dr. Bova also does a great job of portraying how the dilemmas facing Earth would affect a Mars mission. A massive dislocation of the population of the United States is occurring as a result of the rising sea level caused by global warming. As such, any attention that an average American might otherwise pay to the Mars expedition is spent focused on the situation on Earth. Thus, supporters of the Mars expedition are constantly struggling to devise new ways of bringing their endeavors to the attention of the public, which in turn affects their ability to raise funding for continued operations.

While I enjoyed Mars Life, it has several problems. First of all, while it is laudable that Dr. Bova focused on the realistic issues that would be faced by a Mars expedition, this doesn't really translate into a consistently interesting story. So much of the book is devoted to fretting over funding and the like that by the time one finishes the book it is difficult to escape the feeling that not much has really happened in it.

My second complaint is that the book's treatment of the relationship between science and religion--which promised to be a central theme of the book--never really gets off the ground. Throughout the book, the religious fundamentalists want to shut down the Mars expedition and the members of the expedition don't. This is more or less the extent of the treatment of the issue. I was disappointed that there wasn't a deeper exploration of this tricky but extremely interesting issue.

Mars Life uses science fiction to speculate about the pressures that an actual mission to Mars would face and in doing so covers ground that many science fiction authors simply take for granted. While this is an admirable pursuit, I feel like the book would have benefited from more action and a deeper exploration of the relationship between science and religion.

Rating: 5/10

The True First

Mars Life was originally published in the United States by Tor in August of 2008.

[This review was based on a review copy]